


ashes, ashes

by ghost_lingering



Category: Harry Potter - Rowling
Genre: Incest, Multi, necrophilla
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2005-06-07
Updated: 2005-06-07
Packaged: 2017-10-03 12:10:18
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,382
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17904
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ghost_lingering/pseuds/ghost_lingering
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>ring around the rose, a pocket full of posy, ashes, ashes, we all fall down</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	ashes, ashes

So pale, you're like the underbelly of a thousand diatoms stacked white in the waves. You learned the word _diatom_ once before Hogwarts, wearing too-large clothes and hungry, because you had only stale toast that morning. This morning the hunger was maggots in your stomach, white and eating ulcers through the thick wall.

It is nine in the morning and your hands are tissue paper thin, rattling so much that you're afraid that you'll blow away in the wind, just like the shivering leaves from those bare-bone trees, bent back over the brick wall out back of the house. Between their cracked bark trunks and their spider web roots, you pile the bodies, waiting them in line. You tend the dead-everything else left up to the others. Gravedigger, with no graves to dig. The ash from the crematorium blows in your face like a benediction, and you hold out your tongue to catch the flakes before they fall to the ground.

+++

"You will never know when their last attack is," Draco says, as Luna nods, agreeing with him, her hands in your hair.

Draco is almost smiling, and his hands drop from the table and he looks at the rest, and you can't tell what he's thinking.

"There is nothing," he says, "that you can do about it."

But Draco's words don't change anything; Neville and the rest still plan attacks-counter-attacks-for five people to go against upwards of five hundred. But everyone knows nothing you do will matter in the end any way.

+++

You watch him and the rest; everyone has a sick fascination with him. At dinner he tells stories of the Death Eaters, and no one tells him to shush. He knows how to play an audience. _Girls in pretty dresses_, he tells Ginny stroking her neck and downward, watching Ron's hands clench and grow white, too horrified to say anything. Luna hands him tea. Later looking at Fred and George he says, _we made potions out of their bodies when we were done_. Hermione looks grey, but Fred stares him down, while George picks up the dishes and brings them to the kitchen.

He never talks to Neville. You think he talks to you, but the ashes are a smooth burn in your eyes, and you can no longer be sure of what you see or hear or feel. Sometimes you think his hands fall on your skin, press your body hard against the ground, press hard until your limbs go limp, until your fingers flex in the dirt and you writhe, aching like the arched back corpses decaying beneath you.

+++

Sometimes, in the silence between you, he watches you back, and you wonder what each of you are seeing.

+++

At night you sleep next to Luna. It's not what everyone thinks it means. You run your hands down her breasts and she presses a fist to her mouth. You each know how to hold someone who wakes in a cold sweat. You never kiss, but she tastes like tears in the back of your throat and her skin is as cold as a granite marker at a gravestone.

This is what your relationship is: you don't have sex. You aren't in love. Before, you only told people you were dating because it was easier than the truth. Now, when there are so few left, it never occurs to you that no truth could cover this. In the middle of the night, too drained to cry out, you rock each other in your arms and cry. When the morning comes there are no questions, and no one is left who can judge you.

+++

Ginny and Luna, Fred and George, Neville. In the end, these are the teams that are sent out. Once, a long time ago, you could have sent more, but their bodies were burned or buried or lost long ago. Hermione and Ron are also a team, but they are still stuck in the Black family library. You let Hermione and Ron do their research, kiss. They are waiting for marriage to make love.

You and Draco are left to tend the graves yourselves; everyone else is busy, or dead.

+++

Neville is your first offense, or maybe just the last defense; he is good at what he does. One time, when Draco wasn't performing a show, he admitted that Neville was feared among the Death Eaters.

When Neville is sent out for an attack, there are no prisoners brought back alive. Though it has been a long time since anyone has bothered to take a prisoner. Later, Luna and Ginny will find bodies which you burn in the incinerator. Draco tells you, again no audience, that the ashes taste like his father.

You kiss his lips and walk away. There are stories that each of you will never tell.

+++

One day you see Ginny and Luna sitting on a bed, crying, hands in each others hair foreheads pressed together as tightly as they can. Once, they were pretty, though the last time they wore dresses was when the Death Eaters dressed them in ones. That night, when Luna presses into your side, curled, fetal position, under the thin covers, you wonder whose hands have trailed down her body, what places their fingers probed, if their flesh has since been transmutted, transfigured, transformed into the cherry blossom ashes outside on the ground.

+++

You remember giving Fred and George a bag of gold once, to make potions that would make people laugh. They still make potions, but no one laughs any longer. They make potions, and they go out and they kill Death Eaters, and they make potions. Fred and George don't seem to need anybody but themselves. If you were all still at Hogwarts, Draco would sneer and say: "Shagged your brother recently?" but now the joke wouldn't be nearly as funny. They make potions and kill Death Eaters. Beyond that you have only half formed phrases heard from behind thin walls, and the idea of them, stiff and pallid, twined together, their mouths frozen in identical garrish grins.

+++

Voldemort is dead. You know this in your bones and feel it run through your blood. You and he faced off on a wide field, and the night was wide around you, and you flung your arm forward and yelled _Avada Kedavra_, and he was a moment too slow, and-

You and Draco wait for the others to return. The Death Eaters have become too strong to stop. On the right are the dementors, and on the left are the giants, and in the middle are the spiders and vampires and the dark things that now walk freely in sunlight. You tell Draco that they shall soon march through the world with no opposition. He touches his legs, and you tell him that you already have everyone's grave dug.

Killing Voldemort wasn't the end-all everyone assumed.

+++

Draco washes under the moon and you watch him, sometimes, when Luna is gone or her fingers are tangled in Ginny's hair. His torso is tattoos and dark lines of old whips or knives. He had been so pretty once, so pretty, but Voldemort must have touched him, when he was so pretty like that.

Neville had found him, another dead body in an old Death Eater camp; you threw him in the fires and heard his screams. His legs are still burned and near dead, but he can walk now, stand, and he owes the Death Eaters nothing. He washes his body again and again, scrubbing his skin away.

It is not a bad thing, you quiet and watching him (so sallow in the night), you reaching down between your open legs, feeling yourself, wet and strange under your hand, ashes blowing all around you.

+++

It is night and the sky is cold, as cold and wide as when Voldemort died. Draco is beside you and you both freeze, alone, waiting for the bodies to come back, the bodies of friends you can no longer remember. He reaches over to you and touches your arm, your shoulder, your hand.

"I taste like ashes," you try to say, but his mouth is so cold, and you touch back.

+++

_ring around the rosy, a pocket full of posy, ashes, ashes, we all fall down_


End file.
